The Demon She Kindled in Moonlight
by Torti Quercu
Summary: A disastrous mission in Vietnam has Hawkeye and the Black Widow trapped on a bridge, setting the stage for an unexpected realization. One-shot, rated cautiously for language. Part of my Demon series.


Jumping off the Ka Long River Bridge had not been high on the list of things Natasha had hoped to do that day. It was a casual habit of hers, every morning when she showered, she would itemize the day's tasks. Today's list had been nothing exciting: visit the markets, buy fresh dragon fruit, meet up with SHIELD operative Lê Tích Thoa, assassinate an opium drug lord and destroy his cyber network, go swimming at Tra Co Beach etc. The usual stuff. And things had been progressing towards a nice and tidy resolution of her daily agenda, right up until utter catastrophe derailed it all.

Clint had called it a "comedy of errors", but Natasha hadn't found any of it funny. It was a disastrous cascade failure that started with a tragically curious pot-bellied pig, and ended with her partner's right arm broken in several places... assuming that their miserable luck was even up yet. Natasha was furious... furious, cold and bleeding, and when she found herself looking out over the muddy waters of the Ka Long, machine gun fire punctuating her every labored breath, she wanted to scream in frustration.

"This is less than ideal," she shouted, returning fire on a cluster of Golden Triangle mercenaries as they approached. She glanced down at her partner, he was crouching beside her feet, calmly shooting his machine pistol with his off-hand.

"The motorcycle was not my idea," he replied, shooting out the tires of a black Haval SUV as it pulled up beside their attackers. "And for the record, there was no mention of colour-blindness anywhere in Tran's file, and the preschool fire drill was just bad luck. Also, how was I supposed to know that Thoa figures the last day of every lunar month is unlucky? Frankly I think we're doing pretty well, here."

"_черт возьми!_" Natasha started spitting out a long string of swear words, and quickly reassessed their position. She noted clusters of wooden fishing boats anchored together around the bridge piers, moored there at the end of the day. "Reinforcements from Mong Cai can't be more than a few minutes away and we're out of daylight. Unless you can sprout some wings, Hawk, it's time to swim. Gimme a grappling hook and the data spike."

Her partner looked up at her with a grimace as he keyed in a sequence on the handle of his bow. His quiver whirred silently as it attached special tips to two blank arrows. "I'm not gonna ask if you're sure about whatever you're about to do, but..." he paused to shoot a rushing mercenary between the eyes, "... whatever it is, I'm sure we can come up with a better plan. Y'know, if we have a nice little sit-down, brainstorm a while, maybe graph out some possibilities..."

"Shut up, Barton," she yelled, grabbing the arrows off his back and pulling out several yards of slack on the tow line attached to one of them. "I can't draw your goddamned 250-weight bow and I _definitely_ can't take any more of your jokes. Brace your arm and get your ass over that barrier before I throw you."

"Touchy!" he exclaimed as he rose to his feet. She covered him with gunfire, backing after him as he sprinted to the side of the bridge and climbed over the concrete edge. She pulled a small black cylinder off of her belt, throwing it at the overturned cart they had been using as shelter. The wooden cart burst into enthusiastic flames, quickly engulfing both itself and the crashed motorcycle on top of it. The latter exploded shortly afterwards, as the fire reached its leaking gas tank.

Natasha hopped over the barrier and joined her partner, clinging to the railing above the churning Ka Long River. "How much line have I got on this?" she shouted over the crackling flames and gunfire.

"Seventy-five yards," Clint yelled in reply, staring down at the water. "Tasha, this is really not sitting well with me."

She reached behind him and detached the grappling cable from his quiver. "It'll be fine," she assured him with more confidence than she actually felt. She sat down on the ledge and snaked the wire around the base of the rail.

Clint dropped down beside her to assist, and Natasha suddenly leaned into him and gave him a quick, unexpected kiss on the lips. "For good luck," she breathed when she pulled away. He stared at her with his mouth agape, his face turning red. She laughed, a beautiful sound like the pealing of bells, and pushed herself off the bridge. Clint's heart clenched as he watched her shoot like an arrow down towards the muddy river. Shit, she knew exactly how to press his buttons... and as exasperating as it was, goddamn he loved it.

Natasha slipped like a knife into the Ka Long, gasping at the cold as she emerged. She paddled around for a moment as she got her bearings, then expertly swam towards a ladder on the side of one of the wooden fishing boats. She climbed up into the boat easily, and silently climbed up onto the cabin roof. In one fluid motion, she pulled out the grappling arrow and stabbed it down into the roof with a solid thunk.

Clint was groaning over her comm. "Please tell me that you didn't go through all of that just so I wouldn't get my feet wet," he murmured from above.

She looked back up, grinning at her partner's small and distant form. "I'm not letting you try to swim with open fractures, you idiot. You promised me _gỏi cuốn_ with peanut sauce and a walk on the beach, and I'm holding you to it."

He didn't reply over the radio, but moments later he was sliding down the cable towards her. The boat dipped low into the water as he landed beside her on the cabin roof. She grabbed him as he wobbled, helping him upright. He turned on her, his pale eyes flashing in the darkness. "I swear to God, Natalia Alianova, you're gonna drive me absolutely..." he growled, but Natasha pulled him down by his good elbow as she realized the machine gun fire above had ceased.

"Not now, Clint, as much as I love to watch you rant. I think we're about to have company."

Clint pulled the grappling hook out of the wood and detached the cable as Natasha hopped off the cabin and went about cutting the boat's moorings. The fishing boat slowly bobbed free as they quickly ducked into the cabin, and Clint approached the controls. "There were some little private docks a few blocks from the Mong Cai stronghold," he said as he started the engine and pushed the boar into gear.

"Great," she replied, checking the ammunition in both of her guns. "I'll look for them while you're sailing to Dongxing."

He stared at her, not believing his ears. "... _what_? Not a fucking chance, Nat. No way."

She ignored him while she glanced around the cabin, looking for any items of utility.

"Natasha. NO. Not leaving you."

She spun around with her hands on her hips, looking for all the world like a furious and soggy water spirit. "Clint, you listen to me," she ground out. "If I _ever_ hear those words from you again, I'm gonna to break both your collarbones while you sleep. This mission became mine the moment those pallets fell on you in the warehouse, whether you like it or not."

He remained silent, meeting her eyes with his jaw set angrily. She stepped towards him with a dangerous look on her face. "Tell me. If I was Coulson or Lê or even Morse, would we be having this conversation?"

"Not the point," he growled back at her.

"I think it is, Barton," she hissed back. "You _know_ you're a liability now. I need to finish this mission and I need you to draw them towards Dongxing to do that. You need to get to the extraction point and get your arm looked at before you have permanent nerve damage. That would spell 'desk job' and you know it. So why are you arguing with me?"

He let out a snarl of frustration and ran his left hand over his face. "God_dammit_, Tasha! You had better make it back in one piece, or I'm going to fucking kill you myself."

She roughly grabbed the front of his jacket. "I will... so that you can _try_ it," she replied fiercely, and because she was still buzzing with adrenaline and he had just coughed out the closest thing he would ever manage to admitting she was right, and maybe a little bit because Clint angry had always kinda turned her on, she pulled him sharply towards her and planted her lips solidly against his.

"_Mmmrfff!_" he exclaimed in surprise.

She responded by deepening her kiss and hungrily threading her hands up into his hair. He smelled like smoke and gunfire and _Clint_ and it was so intoxicating that her head began to spin. By that point, he had realized that this wasn't another one of her mischievous pecks and he folded his left arm around her, fervently returning her kiss in kind. He sucked lightly on her bottom lip and elicited, to his delight, an unintentional groan from her. Her stomach suddenly felt like the bottom had dropped out of it and _that_ was something new and strange and possibly dangerous, and she looked up at him with an undisguised look of wonderment.

He laughed, and held her tightly. "That's how I feel every time I look at you, you know," he whispered into her wet hair. "I'm sorry, Nat. I know I shouldn't, but..." he sighed, and pulled away from her. "Alright, firecracker, you're wasting time. Get your ass back into the water and finish your job. Go kill the bad guy. Don't die."

Her smile was like the moon over the Ka Long. She ran her hands down the side of his face, and stole another brief kiss. "_That_ one was for luck," she exhaled.

"Now this _definitely_ wouldn't be happening if you were Coulson," he teased, and he reached up to softly touch her lips. "_GO_, Black Widow, before I lose my cool."

Still grinning, she disappeared out of the cabin and over the side of the boat, and he heard a faint splash as she slipped back into the brown water of the river. He counted to five and pushed the throttle full forward, figuring that he may as well give the Golden Triangle mercs an obvious target and hope he could pull them all away from his partner.

"Yep," he murmured aloud to himself, still burning from her kisses, aching all over and utterly overwhelmed. "Nice job, Agent Barton. _Totally_ compromised."


End file.
